I would like to really point out something. You should compare operating systems / releases of the same age. Windows XP is in terms of software lifetime really old already, released in 2002. Pitting it against newest Ubuntus and such is simply not fair.

(You ask me the author of that write up is a complete retard.)

Vista’s installation and features were crafted for their perceived user base.. Go figure. It’s in almost every sense an improvement over XP.About the rest you can see mostly fud and yelling from people who have not even really used it. Also the hardware support has got better. The faults it has it has because Microsoft simply lacked cojones. They can’t change things too much (not even apparent gigantic problems) or they just get sued by gazillion trolls and companies. The amount of legacy decisions and features they are supporting is their #1 problem.

Hardware support is actually quite nice. They once stated something like that 99% of Windows crashes are driver problems. They got laughed at because of that comment at zealot sites such as Slashdot… But then they started actually driver testing and standardizing things and thinking about how new drivers could get into Windowses.. And the outcome is pretty awesome. Solid, stable.

Naturally some companies wanted to just continue sitting their thumbs up their butts, and not start fixing these problems… Their drivers are not included by default. You should think of that and the general attitude of the hardware vendor before you mock Windows for failing to work with Realtek stuff.

Quite honestly I think that most of the hardware vendors just suck. They do towards Linux (not providing documentation etc) but they do that also towards Windows. For instance Syntek is one of the companies that should just *cough*.

Once the general change resistance has passed (we saw this when XP was released too, pretty much similar stuff.. yet it sold more than any other piece of software in history) you will notice Windows is far from backed into a corner.

Uses more memory? Mine seems to be on par with XP, taking only tiny fraction of it all.. XP seemed to take only couple hundred megabytes, and so seems Vista. I can not detect any real difference to be honest. Although I have to admit that I disabled the spyware checking and firewall entirely, because they are entirely unnecessary to have on computer anyways.

The new control panel? I don’t honestly see anything really different from XP other than that the icon theme has improved greatly. Only some networking setting has been moved but it’s fast enough to find. The Windows Explorer now handles huge directories even better, does nice previewing etc.. Internet Explorer is slightly weird but it fits the rest, unlike the competitors’ products – improving the usability in overall way beyond the level of Firefox and others.

Actually, Microsoft did not make any effort to make WinXP programs and drivers work better because the applications and the driver model were broken severely. Quality software continued working, and now it’s the time to get rid of some of the worst crap. Which is one of the best things that has ever happened on operating systems.

Mr Wolfe’s biggest mistake, and it is a stupid mistake, is that he draws a conclusion (Ubuntu is “tough to install on laptops”) from a sample that’s not statistically reliable (in his case, only one laptop).

I think it likely that many Ubuntu supporters make the same mistake in reverse: they can install Ubuntu fine on their own computers, so they overestimate the ease of installation for everyone else. And then they make comments on each other’s Weblogs, creating a bit of an echo chamber.

I would like to see a proper scientific study of this. In a random sample of computer users, what proportion can install Ubuntu on their own computers? And if they fail, why do they fail? Is it because they can’t find where to download it? They don’t understand how to burn the CD? Ubuntu doesn’t start up? They’re disabled and can’t turn on accessibility tools for the installer? They don’t understand the partitioning step? Etc.

If we had figures like that, we would know where we need to concentrate on improvements (and the community would receive a healthy dose of realism). I guess that the worst problems at the moment are with burning the CD, choosing disks/partitions, and hardware support, in that order. But that’s only a guess.

The burning the CD is also one we see the most questions on in #ubuntu and #kubuntu, but that isn’t really our fault, because the people can’t figure out how to burn the image with Windows.

That is still something we could do something about. For example, we could create a self-contained Windows executable that contained the ISO plus a cdrkit-powered disc burner. No external software required, and no chance of accidentally burning the .iso file as a data file instead of a disc image.